Trafalgar took the stairs.
The upper floor of the carriage was narrower than the lower passage, built for private rooms and expensive silence. Now it looked like the train had swallowed a battlefield and tried to keep moving.
The first thing he noticed was the blood.
It dragged across the carpet in broken lines, smeared by boots, hands, or bodies that had tried to crawl before the gas finished its work. One passenger lay half inside a private room, one arm stretched toward the hallway, fingers curled around nothing. His chest still moved, faint but present.
Another body did not move at all.
Trafalgar stepped over him without slowing.
The lights flickered above, turning gold to sickly white and back again. Somewhere beneath the floor, the train groaned against the storm, metal and mana formations fighting to keep everything locked together. The windows were white from snow, giving the whole corridor the feeling of moving through a wall that never ended.
